Thanks; I'll revisit the idea of buying one after the festive season I think. Not sure whether to get the standard version, or an S or E. I have a criminally undersused F5 somewhere; always regret buying it over an F100, as the F5 is so big and heavy, I ended up not taking it out much. Amazing camera though.

If your F5 was too massive then an MB20 equipped F4 will be nice - its a fair beast with the S grip - E is worse. Unfortunately the MB20 is fairly rare but does show up now and again.
Overall its a lovely machine for manual stuff - autofocus is slow - but the viewfinder amd feel of the controls makes it all worth it.

Linhof technicardan. Better to use than any wooden field camera and equally at home in the studio, folds down in an instant and has axis tilts/swings front and rear and enough rise/fall/shift for any image circle. Like any tool the more you use it the more you appreciate the thought that went into it.
Mines in the cupboard under the stairs (along with a Hassleblad 503cxi, 40mmFLE and 80mm). Not used them for years as they are no use if you want to make money and not waste time on a shoot.

Contax 139 quartz. Not the most popular brand but boy was it a great camera. I saved up for about 2 years to buy the damn thing, getting up at 4am every Saturday morning to work as a van lad for Sunblest (another blast from the past!). I sold it on fleabay about 6-7 years ago, but I hung onto the Zeiss Tesslar lenses,and glad I did. The 50mm is frighteningly sharp at just about every f-stop, and is nearly 30 yrs old. Wait! that makes me......... Blimey.

They are not 'magic' it's just swedish and German engineering. I drop kicked an A12 film back by accident and watched it bounce across a metal boat deck, picked it up and carried on shooting. If it had been a mamiya it would have shattered into pieces.
They certainly don't make them like that anymore (production stopped this year) the H series are far more fragile.

Always fancied one of these though never got round to using one, used to use a deardorff 10x8 that was a pain as no rear axis tilts or shifts so it had to be done on the front standard and that meant changing jiggling the camera position, an arca-swiss was much easier to use.

Ditto on the Pentax LX. Awesome camera! As a Nikon user would have to say the FM2n was prob the best camera they ever made. (Still got mine!) The Nikon F4S was a bit of an odd ball. Very sturdy and bombproof, great viewfinder. However, very heavy, and the AF was total crap. Left mine turned off!

Sorry but the Zenit E is more of the Molotov Cocktail of the camera world.

Of all the film cameras I've owned or used I'd also rate the Nikon FM2n as the best.

These 2 weren't bad either , the top one is the Photosonic 1PL which ran at up to 500 pin registered 16mm frames a second.
The bottom one is the NAC E-10 which would run at 10,000 fps in full frame or 20,000 in half frame and went through 400ft of 16mm film in a tad over 2 seconds.

1) A 110 plastic thing I had when I was about 8. You could buy a stick of ten single-use flash bulbs that you stuck in the top. That was cool.

2) A generic 35mm compact, built in flash tho.

3) My dad's Chinon that he gave me when I was 21. This was a huge deal, the camera had captured my childhood and was revered as a precious item - mint condition too. It cost about £300 in the early 80s.

4) That got robbed from my house when I was ooh, 24 ish, so the insurance replacement was a Pentax MZ-M. Unremarkable, except for the incredibly low weight. We had good times though.

5) In 2001 I bought an Olympus C-2020Z, 2.1MP but it had full manual control and decent features. Was far better to use than most modern compacts I've tried. We were pretty close, me and that camera. I was gutted when it got knocked off its mini-tripod whilst on, and the lens got knocked out of shape. Cost me £500, bought in the USA. It came with an 8MB Smartmedia card which only held about 25 odd full size JPEGs so I had to use low quality images. Caught some great pics but they are somewhat spoiled by JPEG artefacts. Still got some on my wall though!

6) My wife bought me a C-5050Z in 2005 which was awesome. I have loads of stuff up on the wall from that. Gave it away to my sister in law when I got...

7) My first DSLR, Olympus E-600, which I still have and use.

Last one I bought was an Olympus TG-620. Not the best compact, to be fair, but toughness is brilliant.